New NASA Report Reveals Ice Caps Are Not Melting

Ever since 1979, NASA satellites have been collecting data on the extent of the Earth’s polar ice caps. Traditionally, this information has been used to prove the threat global warming poses to the human race. If the ice caps are melting, it could displace millions of people living along coastlines across the planet. However, new data posted on NASA’s website suggests that the ice caps may not be melting after all.

The report shows that when the data is averaged, the extent of the ice caps remained static until 2005, which is when they started to recede. By 2012, they had lost 10% of their original mass. But since that time, the ice caps have increased 5% over the 1979 average. In any event, it turns out that the 1979 benchmark used to gauge ice melt, was abnormally high. At the time, our planet had witnessed the end of a 30 year cooling period, thus our ice caps were much larger than they would normally be.

This information appears to be in direct contrast to NASA’s previous reports. The data update arrived less than a week after NASA announced that the Larson B Ice Shelf, which is widely believed to be over 10,000 years old, would melt and disintegrate over the next few years.

– See more at: http://www.thedailysheeple.com/new-nasa-report-reveals-ice-caps-are-not-melting_052015#sthash.6XRlkL7c.dpuf

Are There Any Evils Global Warming Is Not Responsible For?

Floods strand motorists after heavy rain in Houston on Tuesday. AP View Enlarged Image

Hysteria: Deadly flooding in Texas and Oklahoma is being blamed on global warming. Last year, when Texas was in a drought, global warming was also held responsible. Has anyone thought that maybe it’s just the weather?

‘Torrential downpours and events like this are consistent with the general theory of global warming,” Dave Schwartz of the Weather Channel has told the International Business Times.

Writing in the Huffington Post, James Gerken asks if the disaster is “climate change in action,” then answers his own question, declaring that, “at minimum, the recent downpours in Texas probably offer a glimpse of what certain parts of the U.S. can look forward to in the coming decades.” 

Meanwhile, Bill Nye, who doesn’t strike us as a particularly good science guy, tweeted:

“Billion$$ in damage in Texas & Oklahoma. Still no weather-caster may utter the phrase Climate Change.”

Not to be left out is Scientific American, which headlined a Web story thusly:

“Climate Change May Have Souped Up Record-Breaking Texas Deluge.”

So, we have to wonder, what about last year, when Texas had to worry about a shortage of rain and parched earth? Surely if heavy rains are deviations from the norm caused by global warming, then the dry conditions found in Texas must be natural and not the product of man-made climate change.

Well, not in the eyes of those who see man-made global warming as cause for every weather event that seems to be outside the ordinary. Last year during that harsh drought, they were also happy to lecture the public about global warming’s role.

“More Drought, Heat and Water Wars: What Climate Change Already Means for Texas” screamed a May 6, 2014, National Public Radio headline.

On that same day, the Dallas Morning News cited a federal report that said “worse” global warming effects were “ahead for Texas.”

Ten days later, Think Progress was swearing “Climate Change Dries Out Texas.”

A year earlier, USA Today reported that “Climate change’s heat intensifies drought in the USA.” And the 2011 Texas drought, reported NBC News, was “20 times more likely due to warming.” Climate Central cited a study that year that found that global warming was “amplifying Texas drought, wildfires.”

So, yes, global warming causes drought — and it causes heavy rain. In fact, it doesn’t matter what the weather does; there is a faction out there that’s always prepared to say that human-caused emissions of carbon dioxide are responsible.

The rational explanation for what appear to be weather extremes is actually found within the International Business Times story we cited above.

Far below the headline, Russell Persyn, a watershed engineering manager with the San Antonio River Authority, noted: “Texas in general goes back and forth from being very drought-stricken to where we get these heavy rainfalls that occur within a few hours.”

Neither drought nor hard rain is new to Texas and Oklahoma, whose histories are filled with excessive wet periods and extreme dry spells. This cycle was spinning before we began emitting CO2 and it will still be spinning after our CO2 emissions have ceased. These are facts, but some want the rest of us to forget them.

While many American parents are angry about the Common Core educational standards and related student assessments in math and English, less attention is being paid to the federally driven green Common Core that is now being rolled out across the country. Under the guise of the first new K-12 science curriculum to be introduced in 15 years, the real goal seems to be to expose students to politically correct climate-change orthodoxy during their formative learning years.

The Next Generation of Science Standards were released in April 2013. Thirteen states and the District of Columbia have adopted them, including my state of New Jersey, which signed on in July 2014 and plans to phase in the new curriculum beginning with the 2016-2017 school year. The standards were designed to provide students with an internationally benchmarked science education.

While publicly billed as the result of a state-led process, the new science standards rely on a framework developed by the Washington, D.C.-based National Research Council. That is the research arm of the National Academy of Sciences that works closely with the federal government on most scientific matters. 

All of the National Research Council’s work around global warming proceeds from the initial premise of its 2011 report, “America’s Climate Choices” which states that “climate change is already occurring, is based largely on human activities, and is supported by multiple lines of scientific evidence.” From the council’s perspective, the science of climate change has already been settled. Not surprisingly, global climate change is one of the disciplinary core ideas embedded in the Next Generation of Science Standards, making it required learning for students in grade, middle and high school. 

The National Research Council framework for K-12 science education recommends that by the end of Grade 5, students should appreciate that rising average global temperatures will affect the lives of all humans and other organisms on the planet. By Grade 8, students should understand that the release of greenhouse gases from burning fossil fuels is a major factor in global warming. And by Grade 12, students should know that global climate models are very effective in modeling, predicting and managing the current and future impact of climate change. To give one example of the council’s reach, these climate-change learning concepts have been incorporated almost verbatim into the New Jersey Department of Education model science curriculum.

Many of the background materials and classroom resources used by instructors in teaching the new curriculum are sourced from government agencies. For example, the Environmental Protection Agency has an array of ready-to-download climate-change primers for classroom use by teachers, including handouts on the link between carbon dioxide and average global temperatures and tear sheets on the causal relationship between greenhouse-gas emissions and rising sea levels. 

Similarly, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the Energy Department have their own Climate Literacy & Energy Awareness Network, or Clean, which serves as an online portal for the distribution of digital resources to help educators teach about climate change. One such learning module requires students to measure the size of their family’s carbon footprint and come up with ways to shrink it.

Relying on a climate-change curriculum and teaching materials largely sourced from federal agencies—particularly those of the current ideologically driven administration—raises a number of issues. Along with the undue authoritative weight that such government-produced documents carry in the classroom, most of the work is one-sided and presented in categorical terms, leaving no room for a balanced discussion. Moreover, too much blind trust is placed in the predictive power of long-range computer simulations, despite the weak forecasting track record of most climate models to date. 

This is unfortunate because the topic of man-made global warming, properly taught, would present many teachable moments and provide an example of the scientific method in action. Precisely because the science of climate change is still just a theory, discussion would help to build student skills in critical thinking, argumentation and reasoning, which is the stated objective of the new K-12 science standards. 

For instance: Why has the planet inconveniently stopped warming since the late 1990s even as carbon dioxide levels have continued to rise? How reliable are historical measurements of average global temperatures and atmospheric carbon dioxide levels when, before the 1950s, much of the data are interpolated from such diverse sources as weather balloons, kites, cloud observations, primordial tree rings and Antarctic ice bubbles? 

How statistically significant is a 1.4-degree Fahrenheit increase in average global surface temperatures since 1880 for a 4.6 billion-year-old planet with multiple ecosystems and a surface area of some 200 million square miles? How dangerous is the current level of carbon dioxide in the world’s atmosphere, when 400 parts per million expressed as a percentage of the volume of the atmosphere would equate to only 0.04% or approximately zero?

Employing such a Socratic approach to teaching climate change would likely lead to a rational and thought-provoking classroom debate on the merits of the case. However, that is not the point of this academic exercise—which seems to be to indoctrinate young people by using K-12 educators to establish the same positive political feedback loop around global warming that has existed between the federal government and the nation’s colleges and universities for the past two decades.